The Scarlet Tanager looks like it escaped from a tropical field guide — and in a sense it did, spending most of its year in South America and gracing Michigan's oak forests for a single breeding season. Males are shocking scarlet with jet-black wings and tail; females and fall males are olive-yellow with dark wings. For such a vivid bird it's remarkably easy to miss, foraging deliberately in the canopy fifty feet up.
Find them by ear from mid-May through July: the song is a hoarse, hurried robin — "a robin with a sore throat" — and the call a distinctive "chick-burr." They need large blocks of mature forest; fragmented woodlots expose their nests to cowbird parasitism, making big preserves their Michigan strongholds.
Forest insects — caterpillars, beetles, wasps (bees included, rubbed against bark to remove stingers) — gleaned slowly through the canopy, plus wild fruit in late summer as they fatten for the flight to the Andes' foothills.
They live high in closed canopy and move slowly, and dappled light breaks up even scarlet. Learn the "chick-burr" call and the hoarse robin-like song — ears find tanagers, eyes confirm.
No — cardinals are red all over with a crest and stay near shrub level. A crestless scarlet bird with coal-black wings in the treetops is a Scarlet Tanager.
To northwestern South America — mostly the eastern Andean foothills of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Their Michigan stay runs roughly mid-May to early September.
Most are gone by the end of November. They return in March, reach their highest numbers from May through July, and thin out steadily through late summer as birds head south.
It is an adult male molting in late summer. Males turn olive-green for the winter, keeping their black wings, so August and September birds are often a blotchy mix. Females and immatures are yellow-green with darker wings all year.
Other birds you might be looking at instead.
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